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Welcome to this year's eighth issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for
the Debian community. Finally, we can send mail using [1]morse code,
since the [2]International Telecommunications Union assigned a new
[3]code (. - - . - .) for the "@" sign. Andreas Barth [4]reported
that 16 packages were broken by a recently uploaded broken tar
version, that was fixed later.

Storing RRD Data and Graph Files. Jean-Michel Kelbert [5]asked where
to store [6]RRD files. Since it is [7]impossible to rebuild RRD
files without data loss due to log rotation, it must not be stored in
/var/cache, he asserts later. However, since the graph files are
generated from the data files, they have to go into /var/cache.

Investigation of the new XFree86 License. Branden Robinson
[8]inspected the new [9]license for XFree86 4.4 and higher. He
concluded that the de facto impact of the change to the XFree86
Project, Inc.'s own license is to render the XFree86 source
distribution GPL-incompatible in many aspects. Keith Packard
[10]asserted that he has a strong desire to make the released software
on freedesktop.org from that source completely [11]DFSG-free.

Expiration of the GIF/LZW Patent. Roland Stigge [12]wondered if it is
still possible for sarge to be released before 7 July 2004. If not,
Debian could start preparing to move GIF/LZW patent encumbered
packages from non-free and contrib to main since that's the day when
the patent US4558302 expires internationally.

Report from Solutions Linux. Julien Blache wrote a [13]report about
this years' [14]Solutions Linux exhibition and conference in France.
Several Debian developers met at the Debian booth inside the .Org
pavilion and were even interviewed by a French web radio station about
Debian in general and the upcoming release of sarge. The number of
interested visitors at the booth was also higher, compared to past
events.

Release Progress Report. Colin Watson wrote a new [15]report about
progress made with the release of sarge since December 1st. He said
that the [16]debian-installer is improving, that GNOME 2.4 and KDE
3.1.5 have entered testing and that XFree86 4.3 has been uploaded to
unstable recently. An important task left is to finish
debian-installer and port it to the [17]remaining architectures. There
are also still 350 release-critical bugs on packages in testing. This
isn't something we can release with.

Pure 64-Bit AMD64 Port? John Goerzen [18]proposed to stay with a pure
64-bit port to the [19]AMD64 architecture. When a way forward with the
multiarch is finally laid out they can transition to becoming a
multiarch platform while still supporting those that want a pure
64-bit environment. Josh Hansen [20]added that both efforts will
continue as long as people are willing to devote time to them.

Mozilla Firefox Packages. Eric Dorland [21]announced that he had
uploaded packages for Mozilla Firefox 0.8. Since the package has gone
through a name change (the package was formerly known as phoenix, then
as firebird) it will take about one week until they appear in the
archive. For the interested and impatient he has copied the files to
[22]people.debian.org as well.

Man-pages to be moved to non-free? A recent [23]change in the upstream
[24]man-pages project was detected. As of version 1.65 manual pages
from the POSIX standard are [25]included in the upstream man-pages
distribution. Their copyright, however, doesn't talk about
distribution and modification, but the latter is explicitly not
permitted, according to the upstream maintainer. Since this would
render the entire package non-free, its packaging has changed slightly
so that non-free parts are stripped off in time.

Want to continue reading DWN? Please help us create this newsletter.
We still need more volunteer writers who watch the Debian community
and report about what is going on. Please see the [69]contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your
mail at [70]dwn@debian.org.